This, the second Sucks Arse blog ever written, was first published on MyIGN on 25th March 2011. Again, this is posted in its original form, except for a small edit on a couple of typos that, upon reading for the first time in two years, I was deeply embarrassed about. There goes my job as an indispensable proof-reader for a top publishing house.
I have contained my rage for long enough. I know this game is three years old now, and more than enough has been said about it online before, but it is time for me to unleash the full torrent of my fury upon Rockstar Games’ atrocious excuse for a video “game”, although the word “game” should probably be replaced with the word “evisceration”, as I would have actually preferred to have had my intestines forcibly removed with a spoon rather than play this piece of excreta masquerading as a next generation console game.
- Spoon Not Included
The Grand Theft Auto series of games is one of my personal favorites, starting way back with the original top-down view of 1 & 2, and even GTA: London 1969 (although I thought the transition to London was a ridiculous idea – everyone knows that there’s no cars in London, just dirt track roads, horse-drawn carriages and Penny Farthing bicycles). I thought that GTA3 was pushing the boundaries in a bad way. The switch to a third-person perspective was an absurd idea. What kind of idiot would want to be down there among the action, the guns, the violence, the hookers and the criminal element? It was much safer looking down from up in the clouds, and bringing it down to ground level was a mistake, in my opinion.
- The God-like feeling of playing the original GTA games
But, although it pains me to say it, GTA3 grew on me, like a mold, a rash or a wart. Its open gameplay – or “sandbox”, as they like to call it – side missions, huge map and hidden quirks made it a positively epic game that no other game could even deem itself worthy to gaze upon. By the time San Andreas was released, I was about ready to give up on any game that wasn’t called Grand Theft Auto. I think I actually orgasmed when I first got control of GTA:SA’s central protagonist, CJ. And then GTA4 came along and RUINED the Whole Damn Thing.
THE STORY is rubbish. Absolutely nothing happens in this game at any point. You’re just thrown in at the deep end of nothing, driving people around in a taxi cab owned by your brother or cousin or nephew or uncle or grandfather. I can’t remember who it was because I found this game so unutterably offensive to my eyes, ears and nose that I didn’t pay the blindest bit of attention to any part of it. Sometimes you have to get out of your car and endure a cutscene – a pre-animated bit of “entertainment” that supposedly propels the “story” along. These cutscenes are so lame that I skipped every one of them. Seriously, the story is that bad. I would imagine. I don’t actually know, because I didn’t watch any of the cutscenes. In fact, I got to the final mission and found myself chasing some guy who was trying to kill me, and I have no idea why. Who the hell was this Dmitri character anyway? Was he in one of those cutscenes? I don’t know.
- Who the hell is this guy, and why is he trying to kill me?
CONTROLS Why the hell did they change them all? Accelerating and braking with the shoulder buttons? Really?! What is this – Racedriver: Grid 2? If I want to play a game with racing game controls then I’ll buy a racing game. Somebody told me that I can change the controls in the menu, but WHY THE HELL SHOULD I? Rockstar Games should cater to MY every whim, and MINE ALONE! And it’s IMPOSSIBLE to turn off the radio. I tried everything, and I couldn’t do it. Someone told me that a message comes up on screen early on in the game telling you how to turn off the radio, but who reads those on-screen instructions? I’m trying to play a game here! And a shit one, at that. And when a friend of mine came round my house and tried to turn off the radio they managed to do it, but I couldn’t, so it’s shit. (And on a side note, in the add-on “Episodes from Liberty City” the radio only played rock music when you were riding a bike, and I hate rock music. Not being able to turn off the radio OR change the station? That’s just stupid! Even though there were plenty of different radio stations that didn’t play rock music. And a friend of mine was able to switch stations when on a bike. AND turn the radio off. But I couldn’t do it, so it’s double-shit.)
SIDE MISSIONS In the GTA3 series you were given all sorts of side missions: taxi driver missions, vigilante missions, fire fighting missions, ambulance missions. I’m disgusted and appalled that Rockstar saw fit to take all these missions out, despite the fact that I never used to play them because I was crap at them and I found them frustrating, annoying and a waste of time. But they TOOK THEM OUT! Why would they do that? Because they’re ass-munchers, that’s why. If Rockstar is going to remove arbitrary shit from their games then they deserve all the wrath and ire that is directed at them. Just knowing that GTA4 is a little bit less than any GTA before it makes it garbage and a waste of time.
GRAPHICS I’m actually going to give Rockstar a little bit of credit here, because the graphics are very good indeed. However, I have to take issue with them a bit as well, for two main reasons: 1) if they’d spent a little less time sprucing up the graphics and a little more time adding in extra missions then I’d have been a lot happier – where were the “picking up trash” missions, the “street sweeping” missions and the “cleaning up dog poop” missions that they could have oh-so-easily incorporated into the game? I’ll tell you where – shoved to one side, at the mercy of this obsession with “Next Generation Graphics”. I’d have preferred GTA4 to have graphics like Pong if it meant I had a billion irrelevant side missions to do. Except that then I would have complained about the graphics. 2) If I want ultra-realistic visuals when stealing cars, gunning down innocents and receiving blow-jobs from prostitutes then I’ll just damn well go outside and do it all for real. This game’s meant to be fiction, damn it – if you want reality then there’s a whole world of it just outside your window! (And I’ve found that prostitutes are surprisingly easy to track down, so no worries there.) Basically, the graphics were completely wasted on this risible POS, so who cares?
- What GTA4 should have been. But I wouldn’t have played it.
PIGEONS! What the hell was that all about? 200 pigeons to track down and shoot? What a stupid idea! Where’s my “secret packages” from GTA3? The ones that some careless delivery guy or mailman has scattered liberally through Liberty City? Where’s my Red Balloons from GTA:Vice City Stories? The ones left over from some parade or clown convention, I assume? Where’s my horseshoes and oysters from GTA:San Andreas? Why, oh why, would anyone want to hunt pigeons, fer Chrissakes?! Although I would gladly spend two weeks of my life hunting down hundreds of packages and horseshoes and balloons and oysters and God Knows what else, the idea of spending a similar amount of time hunting pigeons just makes my blood boil! Damn you, Rockstar Games. Damn you to Hell.
CHARACTERS Niko Bellic. What can I say? Now I’m no racist, but this guy’s Eastern European! What the hell happened to the good ol’ days where all the badass mo-fo’s were American, God damn it?! GTA:San Andreas had CJ – American. GTA:Vice City Stories had Vic Vance – American. GTA:Liberty City Stories had Toni Cipriani – American. GTA:Vice City had Tommy Vercetti – American. And GTA 3 had Claude – American…maybe…or is he French? Maybe he’s French, then, but the blue-jeans/leather-jacket look is so 1950s Americana that he’s either American or an extra from a French production of Grease. Either way, he’s not Eastern European, is he? No. In fact, there’s so few American characters in GTA4 that they should have called it GTA:Slovakia. Then nobody would buy it. Except for Slovakians.
- Slovak Edition
MULTIPLAYER All us die-hard GTA fans have been crying out for online multiplayer since before the internet even existed, but Rockstar have never seen fit to give console owners the joy and pleasure of a multiplayer mode. When I heard this had been rectified in GTA4 I got all excited, even going so far as to buy myself a broadband connection, router, wi-fi card, PC, monitor, TV, Playstation 3, and copy of GTA4. Imagine my disgust, then, when we are presented with Rockstars version of “multiplayer”, in which you play as a character that has nothing to do with the main game who goes around shooting things and driving a lot. And what’s more, they’ve made it so that if you want the trophies you have to play online. For hours, days even, at a time. With friends. Or people you’ve never met. Either way, this “mode” is an insult to hardcore GTA fans everywhere, and Rockstar should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
SEX The GTA series has never rested on its laurels as far as courting controversy goes. Remember the outrage over the “Hot Coffee” minigame in San Andreas? Well, I was hoping that, having successfully had the ban on Manhunt 2 lifted, Rockstar would go all out in GTA4 and not only have hookers who will fellate you in your car, but full-on sex minigames. I had even hoped that with the aid of Playstation Move and a Playstation Eye camera you might be able to get fully interactive with your console. But no. Not only do the prostitutes remain fully clothed throughout an entire sexual encounter, but the strippers at Honkers don’t even fully strip! There’s not a nipple to be seen in the entire game! They’re strippers, for God’s sake! Now, if I want to have any kind of sexual gratification, I might have to exit my house and actually find a real live girl! What the hell?!
All in all, my disappointment with GTA4 can not be expressed in words alone. I had expected great things from this game, and instead all I got was a slap in the face, a depleted bank account and the forcible removal of several weeks of my life. I hated this game, and I loathed every minute that was yanked off my life while I played through it six times to mop up all the trophies. I swear, if this game had been any worse I might have only completed it five times. Maybe even four, I really can’t say for certain. I think that the decent thing for Rockstar games to do is to apologize to all its fans, reimburse everyone’s money, release fifteen separate DLCs for free, upgrade my TV to a 57″ plasma screen and then commit suicide so that nothing like this can ever happen again.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: This post is a continuation of my “Such-and-such-a-game Sucks Arse…” series, and in no way should be taken literally, seriously or orally. For the record, I loved Grand Theft Auto 4 with a love that was deep, abiding and almost unnatural. And you should too….
=D
The Daily Heretic 